82
~ TASIA ~
To taste so much power, strength, and clarity – the promise, too, of a deathless state, which in turn felt like it erased every fear Tasia had ever had, every grief, every pain – and then to have it snatched away with such sudden, brute force, that promise rescinded …
“Joslyn, no … what have you …”
But the numb state of unconsciousness was more appealing than the harsh, cold pain Joslyn had just left her with, so when Tasia felt the darkness coming for her, she embraced it.
What Joslyn had just done to her … Tasia had felt as though she was finally, truly whole for the first time in her life, satiated, transforming into the person she had always been meant to become, and then Joslyn, who claimed to love her, had shattered that with a single slice of that cursed sword. She’d turned Tasia back into only half a self again, leaving a jagged tear in her soul where the undatai had been a moment before.
“Tasia…?”
Joslyn’s voice came to her down a long tunnel of blackness, trying to drag Tasia out of the numbness that was her only salve.
Did the woman’s cruelty never end?
How well did she even know Joslyn anymore, really? She had abandoned Tasia in the underground city of the small men – and not for a day or two. Not even for a month. She’d left Tasia there for years. For a decade. Tasia had mourned Joslyn’s absence at first, had cried herself to sleep each night wishing for Joslyn to come back, to return for her as she’d promised she would, but eventually Tasia reconciled herself to the idea that Joslyn might never return for her and she would be on her own.
So after six months of waiting, Tasia had wandered into the tower in the heart of the city, passed the test at its base, and met Grastinga. At the beginning, Tasia trained in the shadow arts with Grastinga only as a way of passing the time, since she had nothing else to occupy herself with, nothing else to distract her from the grief of being abandoned by the woman she loved. But the more she trained in those arts, the more Tasia realized she was good – she was very good. After a time, she couldn’t even remember why she’d held such trepidation towards the shadow arts.
The small men certainly weren’t afraid of the shadow arts; the small men reveled in them. The arts were a part of everything they did, from lighting their city with those floating orbs of moonlight, to growing their food, to making toys for their children. They didn’t treat the shadow arts as something mysterious and dangerous that either needed to be hidden, like the Brotherhood maintained, or utterly stamped out of existence, like the Wise Men believed. The shadow arts were simply part of their way of life.
Within only a few months of training with Grastinga, Tasia could do things that made Evrart look like one of the small men’s children. After a year of training, she could have easily destroyed Rennus if she’d ever had to face him again.
But her destiny was larger than that, Grastinga told her. Joslyn would come back for her, and when she did, she and Tasia would face the deathless king, the man who had corrupted the shadow arts for selfish purposes and threatened to destroy the precarious balance between mortal realm and shadow realm. Together, Tasia and Joslyn would defeat him, and that balance would be restored once more.
Yet when Tasia had asked exactly how they would defeat him, Grastinga’s answers had always been vague. At the time, Tasia had assumed it was because the art of prognostication was a delicate one; the future was malleable, and even master seers like Grastinga could sometimes be wrong.
Now she wondered if it was because Grastinga hadn’t wanted to tell Tasia that the only way to truly defeat an undatai was with another undatai. Maybe Grastinga knew the intoxication of uniting one’s soul with an undatai and, selfishly, didn’t want to share that knowledge with Tasia.
No matter.
Tasia would leave her mortal body behind and find her way to the Shadowlands once again, and she would find the undatai that had found her in her hour of need. She would unite again with the all-powerful shadow that had made her whole for the first time in her life.
Except Grastinga hadn’t taught Tasia how to travel through the Shadowlands the way Joslyn could – how to dreamwalk and build q’issons and all the rest of it. Strange, really, since Tasia had mastered all the other arts, even skinwalking.
But the fact that Grastinga had kept it from her was irrelevant. Tasia was a strong enough practitioner that she could figure it out on her own.
She dove deeper into the blackness, a blind woman stumbling through an unfamiliar room, groping for a doorway into the Shadowlands. Distantly, as though an echo from another life, she heard Joslyn calling her name.
Joslyn. Tasia had always thought of her as strong, but she knew the truth now. No mortal was strong while they refused union with the shadows. Why should Tasia answer the woman calling her name? She didn’t need Joslyn anymore. Joslyn had left her, abandoned her for ten years, and in that time, Tasia had become someone new. With Grastinga’s help, she’d been born again, not as Empress, but as sorceress.
And now she didn’t even need Grastinga.
There was only one thing Tasia needed, and the need for it consumed her completely: She needed the undatai. She needed it inside her, part of her, inseparable from her.
A force struck Tasia, temporarily disorienting her. She was no longer a mind searching for a doorway into the Shadowlands; she was just a mortal, unconscious woman. A light appeared, chasing away the blackness.She saw the warm, fire-lit interior of the round room at the top of Xochitcyan’s tower, and Tasia knew she was dreaming.
“Would you become what you defeated?” asked a voice behind her.
Tasia didn’t need to turn around to know it was Grastinga, dreamwalking into her mind. Instead of turning around, Tasia walked to the small-man–sized tower window that overlooked the city. It had always reminded her of the small round windows on a ship.
“I would not become the deathless king, no,” Tasia said. “The undatai knows that there is no path forward for shadowkind in destroying the line between the mortal realm and the Shadowlands.”
“Undatai not be trusted,” Grastinga said in her broken common tongue.
“Not this undatai,” Tasia retorted. “This one was different.”
“Undatai like circle wind, like fire beneath mountain. Always. Not different.”
Tasia had known Grastinga long enough to translate what she was trying to say – an undatai was like a hurricane, like a volcano. It wasn’t something a mortal could control.
“But united with a mortal mind, the undatai –”
“Not unite, steal,” Grastinga snapped, uncharacteristically harsh.
She seized Tasia’s arm, spinning her around with a strength Tasia hadn’t known the three-foot woman possessed. The q’isson of the tower dissolved, and Tasia was immersed in a series of other images:
Cities burning.
Children screaming.
Battlefields littered with bodies.
And Tasia – no, not Tasia, but Empress Natasia I, horrible and ruthless and more powerful than any ruler the House of Dorsa had ever produced – would stand above it all, triumphant.
The images disappeared; the gentle firelight of the tower room returned.
And Tasia gasped as though deprived of breath for too long.
“Not unite. Steal,” said Grastinga, her words soft this time.
Tasia understood. She’d been granted a vision of who – of what – she would become if she sought out the undatai and united with it again. She would bring peace to all mankind, yes, but the price for peace would be blood. Oceans of blood. To eliminate those who stood against her vision, she would have no choice but to be ruthless. And with each act of ruthlessness, she would be a little less Tasia and a little more undatai, until eventually there was only a sliver of her mortal self left.
And the undatai? It was a shadow; what did it care for human lives? It knew only how to consume, because that was its nature. Even if it did not share the vision of its predecessor and wish to destroy the boundary between mortal realm and shadow realm, it would destroy the mortal world anyway.
Because destruction was a necessary step in the process of creation.
The need for the undatai was still there, a dull throb inside Tasia’s chest. But it wasn’t all-consuming as it had been a few minutes before. She felt herself… come back, somehow. She didn’t want to become that powerful but terrifying Empress Grastinga had shown her. She remembered that now.
“Was this how it started?” Tasia asked, voice quavering. “For the deathless king? He wanted to make things better, but …”
Grastinga said nothing, and her heavy silence was answer enough.
“Who was he? Before the undatai, who was he?”
“Not already know?” Grastinga said, answering Tasia’s question with a question.
“He was a prince,” Tasia guessed, and she felt the truth of the words as soon as they left her mouth. “He was a prince of the House of Dorsa.”
Grastinga responded with a single nod. There was something both ageless and infinitely sad in her eyes, the gaze of someone who had lived longer and seen more than Tasia ever would.
Tasia would not – could not – make the same mistake as that prince. For the first time, she felt something towards him other than anger and fear. She felt pity. Pity, and recognition, because she could see herself in him, in the choices he’d made.
Suddenly Tasia laughed. “You know, I didn’t ever really want to be Empress in the first place. And here I was, thinking I would rule the world?” She shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. That single word was directed at everything – at the vision Grastinga had shown her of the horrible monster she would become if she reunited with the undatai, but also at the burden of wearing any crown, even as an ordinary mortal.
It was more than not wanting to be Empress. Tasia didn’t even want to be a royal. She’d never truly wanted to be a royal.
Tasia’s thoughts turned back to Joslyn then – Joslyn, who had fought her way through the Shadowlands to come back to her. Joslyn, who despite the passage of a decade, had never stopped thinking about Tasia. While she, the selfish, spoiled princess that she had always been, had allowed herself to slowly grow consumed and fascinated by the shadow arts.
Tasia was ashamed.
Her head fell towards her chest, as if her neck could no longer bear its weight, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. She wished she could unlearn it. Unlearn it all. She wished she could be a nobody – not a princess or an empress or even a highborn, just an invisible commoner with no responsibility to anyone except herself.
Grastinga gazed at her sympathetically, then took both Tasia’s hands in her own. The hands were dry and papery – child-sized but wrinkled like a grandmere’s.
“Shadow arts needed to defeat him,” she said as though reading Tasia’s thoughts. “Shadow arts only way.”
“I know, but…”
“Tall ones never stable in shadow arts.”
It’s not your fault,Grastinga was trying to say. None of your kind is meant to wield such power.
It was supposed to excuse what Tasia had nearly done, excuse how she had felt when the undatai had been within her. Tasia was supposed to forgive herself, because, unlike the small men, the “tall ones” had never handled the shadow arts particularly well.
“Empress strong,” Grastinga said. She squeezed Tasia’s hands reassuringly.
But I don’t want to be the Empress,Tasia thought. Even thinking the word brought back that vision of death and destruction – a vision tainted at its outer edges with an oily longing for that feeling of the undatai inside her once more. She shuddered.
Was it a shudder of horror or a shudder of desire? Or both?